Rize

Photographer David LaChapelle takes an outsider’s look at the current dance scene in south-central Los Angeles. Started by a man named Tommy the Clown, a form of hip-hop dance called “clown dancing” has inspired about 50 crews to put on makeup and make with the put-ons. Recently, some of Tommy’s ex-students have switched to “krumping,” which Tommy describes as a “retarded” version of clown dancing. It culminates, as all films do, in a dance off: clowns versus krumpers. There are lots of touching stories of the street and a clumsy attempt to compare the krump dancers to archaic African dancers, and the whole film is basically a mess, but the dancing is still pretty cool. LaChapelle’s film technique is a mixture of the worst of MTV fast-cutting and the worst of incompetent home-video camera placement, but when he stops trying to do a documentary and just directs the final sequence, things come together, and you see what this movie could have been if it had been more interested in being “good” and less interested in being “authentic.”